Alex Wild’s post about the possibility of infringement on his photography is burgeoning a new discussion of where the limits of copyright lie – legally, ethically, artistically. Very interesting read… the contributions range from thought-provoking evaluation to mind-boggling underrepresentation of the process of staging a photograph like Alex’.

What was copied from the photograph was simply the knowledge of what the ant looks like, and indeed the photo contained very little beyond that to begin with. It’s a catalogue-style shot… the only thing that was copied is the photograph’s subject, which Wild didn’t create.
…
I don’t think this is really a question of copying art so much as repeating facts

Leigh Beadon

I’ve plugged Nina before, and do so again happily. She’s at the forefront of open-licensed financing models, and this is a great overview of her experiences.

Taken aback by the need to even argue the merits of open-access publishing as at svpow, I assure you all that the future of science publishing will not be closed, and will not be paper. A pirate bay dock of published papers need not even be the nail in its coffin… its an eventuality that will come into effect as the merits of digital publishing come to fruition.

Above, the cafe society shows a community editing option called “Lines” which – in the context of scientific publishing – would be akin to dynamically linking an author’s work within a deep-time like lineage of related articles. Am I dreaming? We shall see…

Fantastic macro photographer Alex Wild is very open with his wonderful imagery. Here, he describes a really bad deal. In light of recent discussions at artEvolved about what is and isn’t questionable, this is a good example of what is unquestionably questionable.

PZ Meyers calls XVIVO on bad ethical judgment after accepting a commission on Deepak Chopra. Click xvivo’s fallopian tube above to check it out.

Lots of relevance here, and a burning example of the authority of quality imagery in solidifying a claim – in this case a questionable one. Also of interest is the critique on the animation:

their animations of cellular and molecular processes are spectacular and beautiful, they are also annoyingly purposeful: they show tubulin making a beeline across microns of distance to assemble a microtubule, for instance, while kinesins stride determinedly down the cytoskeleton. There isn’t the slightest hint of the stochastic nature of the biochemistry, and they are seriously misleading in that sense

Nina Paley has become synonymous with her critical view of copyright. She’s also a bold explorer of financial models based on open source. Anyone who’s followed her from the days of her fantastic feature film effort “Rita sings the blues” will know that her openness was at least in part an act of desperation. It’s one of the truly wonderful things about internet culture that her courage has been rewarded.

In light of recent comments by Greg Paul about his artwork, I think this new interview with Nina could be of value to the paleoart community. I doubt there will be much agreement, but it can’t hurt to soak up that energy and to consider alternative mindsets and how they’ve paid off right here, in the real world.

The Illustrator’s Partnership (blog here) just sent me this:

Court Rejects Google Book Settlement

3.23.2011

Yesterday, U.S. Circuit Judge Denny Chin rejected the Book Rights Registry settlement between Google and the US Authors Guild. The $125 million commercial agreement would have rewarded both parties for the largest mass infringement of authors’ copyrights in history. Instead, the judge ruled it a business deal “too far.”

“A Reversal of Copyright Law” is what we called this agreement in our warning to illustrators September 29, 2009. Like the visual arts “databases” we opposed during the Orphan Works fight, we wrote:

“this agreement would allow both Google and a yet-to-be-created Book Rights Registry to commercially profit from an author’s work whenever they say they can’t locate the author.

“Both schemes would force authors to opt out of commercial operations that infringe their work or to ‘protect’ their work by opting-in to privately owned databases run by infringers. This Hobson’s Choice for authors reverses the principle of copyright law.”

Judge Chin held this to be the case. “A copyright owner’s right to exclude others from using his property is fundamental and beyond dispute,” he ruled. “[I]t is incongruous with the purpose of the copyright laws to place the onus on copyright owners to come forward to protect their rights when Google copied their works without first seeking their permission.”

The judge also noted objections to the “Adequacy of Class Representation.”  In short, this holds that neither Google, nor any organizations claiming to represent authors, nor the university libraries that gave Google “permission” to digitize their holdings, own the copyrights to the works this agreement would have allowed them to exploit.

Therefore, they have no standing to broker deals based on claims that they represent the “class” of authors.

The judge held this to be the case even where organizations asserted the right to “expropriate” “orphaned” royalties belonging to rightsholders. Noting that “After ten years, unclaimed funds may be distributed to literary-based charities,” the judge concluded:

“[A]t a minimum a fair question exists as to whether this Court or the Registry or the Fiduciary would be expropriating copyright interests belonging to authors who have not voluntarily transferred them. As Professor Nimmer has written: ‘By its terms Section 201(e) is not limited to acts by governmental bodies and officials. It includes acts of seizure, etc., by any ‘organization’ as well.‘ 3 Melville B. Nimmer & David Nimmer, Nimmer on Copyright §10.04 (Rev. Ed. 2010) (footnote omitted).” [Page 31 of the judge's ruling, emphasis added.]

In rejecting the settlement, Judge Chin also echoed the US Justice Department’s antitrust objections: The deal, he wrote, “would give Google a significant advantage over competitors, rewarding it for engaging in wholesale copying of copyrighted works without permission…” He suggested the settlement might win approval if it were revised to cover only those who opt into the agreement.

- Brad Holland and Cynthia Turner for the Board of the Illustrators’ Partnership

Everywhere, there are organizations representing artists. Canada, Australia, England, California… heck, France has gone so far that they’ve got artists representing organizations. Alone in Germany, my location, there are unions for freelancers, artist coops, digital worker’s and animation guilds – all of which are vying for my membership.

Heated debates spring up in fairly regular intervals with various flavors of recurring arguments: “if you’re any good at what you do then you don’t need a union“  vs “organization is necessary to establish fair practices“.

As I’ve been following these discussions amongst animators for some time, I thought I’d summarize what I want from an organization that represents my work, and what I don’t want.

Awareness, Politics and Public Relations
Yeah, forget the pricing standards. I find it much more important that a representation has the clout, position and understanding necessary to get a message out. To get the museums and journals and magazines to understand what value the visual element brings them, at what cost to the artist / scientist / team with what skill set required. To get the governments to understand the role of this work in the larger context of research, outreach, education and regional competitiveness. To trigger sincere discussions among artists, scientists and publishing channels.
I view this as an important extension of the “educating-my-clients” work that I have to do myself.

Legal consultation
Preparation of muster contracts and information about the meaning of the clauses, access to lawyers when I need one.

Information
Not long ago, if an advertising agency accepted an unpaid pitch – as one of often 6 agencies – they’d be outed by the various journals in the industry as having contributed to this destructive practice. As a result, agencies were hesitant to accept such conditions and client corporations learned that this was an unacceptable thing to request. Even without naming names, knowing what is the going rate is an important parcel of information – one which feelancers are fairly unwilling to exchange themselves. It’s an important gage of your value to the client. Fortunately, Tess Kissinger has gone most of the way in gathering and sharing this information for paleoartists:

Copyrights, Contracts, & Guidelines for Dinosaur Artists & Paleontologists
by Tess Kissinger

It would be interesting to see how regional or technical differences affect rates, which could be gathered in the form of polls.

Training Offers
Freelancers are always educating themselves. Offerings that make this more possible are always welcome, especially if they are broken down into bits and pieces that don’t cost much because they are presented in the form of download-able tutorials, videos or muster files.
Of course nothing beats person-to-person exchanges, so perhaps a sponsored tour could be arranged, information to offerings from other institutions or Things like Mike Habib’s artist meeting at SVP are all very welcome.

Professional Confidence
I was surprised buy this one when I read it in  but indeed, 34% of Illustratoren Organisation rated this very important and 30.8% important.

Platform and exchange of information
There’s a whole gambit of community platform which is currently spread out amongst deviant art, artEvolved and a slew of blogs, sculptor and artist forums. Most established artists will certainly have their own internet platform but younger ones would certainly enjoy the opportunity to have a portfolio amongst other like-minded artists within a platform that invited potential clients to browse them – particularly if the whole thing is cross-indexed from various points of view: species, technique, artist location, reconstruction type, consulting scientist, paper references, etc. Activities such as speed-paints, challenges and themed galleries could create some community vibe and forums could create a structured venue to gather feedback and polish one’s craft. Access to papers might be more easily arranged. And of course, job forums could be posted, for whatever amount anyone pitches… the main thing is not to dictate prices but to make the environment in which they are pitched transparent.

Price
Over at cgheute, German cg artists vote on how much they’d pay for the priviledge of representation. 55% say 10 to 20 Euros a month with only 5% willing to pay more than that. In a branch where the mean earnings hover around 300 Euros a day for experienced artists. We’re stingy bastards.

So… that’s my list. What’s yours?

‘Tis the season to list the do’s and don’ts of paleoart, and Andrea Cau has just posted a simple but interesting list of commandments at his blog. Beyond the potential of taking googlithic translations to seriously, here the list polished in English slightly by myself (which does not exclude misinterpretations):

I – Science is the source of paleoart
II – Thou shall take no reference beyond living creatures, as these represent the closest kin of extinct beasts
III – Thou shall not make any idol, model or inspiration paleoart between the past and living, but you will always be inspired by the only living creatures
IV – Thou shall not call a work “paleoart” in vain
V – Thou  shall honor anatomy and ecology
VI – Thou shall not plagiarize
VII – Thou shall not create mythology
VIII – Thou shall not create false reconstruction
IX – Thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s techniques
X – Thou shall not desire to impress others

Okay, not sure if google was adept enough to take a swig at nr. III, (anyone able to translate that?) but I think the others were fairly close. I, II, IV, V and VIII all seem very straightforward, though I suspect any attempt to concretely define what they mean would lead to some interesting discussion.

IV has been a subject of some contention at artEvolved, with a polarization between the ‘illustrators’ such as myself and those who defend more artistic liberties such as Glendon – resolved at least for now as an issue of semantics.

Until last week, I would have said VI is clear-cut as well, but – well, now I’ll pass.

VII is an interesting formulation. I’d interpret this as a call to resist seeing what you wish to, and allow your work to be driven by what’s there. As such it echoes the others, but I like the way it rings out on its own.

With IX and X the peace fest ends, however…
why should I not covet cool techniques? Why shouldn’t I be driven by them, to learn and improve and inspire the next guy or gal? Particularly in an age of digital toolsets that offer little precedence, of 3D technologies that are perceived as ‘cold’ and expensive, but which offer an efficiency explosion? The science is so complex, the toolsets are so complex… I only see one chance of making all this proceed at a rate which is rewarding and fun… cooperation. I propose: IX – Thou shall open thy tool shed, and wield the tools of thy neighbor with respect, credit and reflection. (And no, I don’t mean those tools.)

And X is an alien thought to me, but this may well lie in the depths of google’s Italian… I’m in this to impress others. Unequivocally. I can understand a scientist being content to study bones, publish papers and dodge public opinion. But I have no chance of becoming a great paleologist, and am really not in it for that. I want to infect others with the impressions I’ve been given. I want kids, adults and aliens to look at this stuff with the amazement that I feel. So I weight this and push that and try to make a story out of it. I’d change this last one to something like: X – Thou shall tremor with excitement and endeavor to endow others with this same infliction.

I’s also probably ditch the biblical tone. Your thoughts?

Link to Andrea’s blog.

OpenAccess and internet connectivity (lists of OpenAccess journals here and here) are making research results and scientific exchange much easier. The German magazine Spiegel just wrote about ResearchGate, a community site akin to Facebook but dedicated to scientific exchange. Monitor-sharing, closed access management and efficient research searches make it very appealing. Search for non-photorealistic rendering there and top-notch results appear, specific searches for something like dynamic canvas research points to a decent overview.